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Equity
Introducing a High-School Exit Exam in Science: Consequences in Massachusetts
Tags: Equity, Science educationPreparing students for science, technology, and engineering careers is an urgent state policy challenge. We examine the design and roll-out of a science testing requirement for high-school graduation in Massachusetts. While science test performance has improved over time for all demographic… more →
Cream Skimming and Pushout of Students Participating in a Statewide Private School Voucher Program
Topics: School ChoiceTags: EquityA pervasive issue in the school choice literature is whether schools of choice cream-skim students by enrolling high-achieving, less challenging, or less costly students. Similarly, schools of choice may “pushout” low-achieving, more challenging, or more costly students. Using longitudinal… more →
Not the Great Equalizer? Local Economic Mobility and Inequality Effects for the Establishment of U.S. Universities
Topics: Families and CommunitiesWe exploit historical natural experiments to test whether universities increase economic mobility and equality. We use "runner-up’" counties that were strongly considered to become university sites but were not selected for as-good-as-random reasons as counterfactuals for university counties.… more →
STEM Summer Programs for Underrepresented Youth Increase STEM Degrees
The federal government and many individual organizations have invested in programs to support diversity in the STEM pipeline, including STEM summer programs for high school students, but there is little rigorous evidence of their efficacy. We fielded a randomized controlled trial to study a… more →
College Field Specialization and Beliefs about Relative Performance: An Experimental Intervention to Understand Gender Gaps in STEM
Tags: Equity, Higher educationBeliefs about relative academic performance may shape field specialization and explain gender gaps in STEM enrollment, but little causal evidence exists. To test whether these beliefs are malleable and salient enough to change behavior, I run a randomized controlled trial with 5,700… more →
Promises, Pitfalls, and Tradeoffs in Identifying Gifted Learners: Evidence from a Curricular Experiment
Disparities in gifted representation across demographic subgroups represents a large and persistent challenge in U.S. public schools. In this paper, we measure the impacts of a school-wide curricular intervention designed to address such disparities. We implemented Nurturing for a Bright… more →
How States Prioritize Educational Needs during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Assessing the Distribution of the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund
Tags: Covid-19 recovery, EquityThe Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed by Congress in 2020 included significant aid to state education systems. These included direct aid to K-12 districts and higher education institutions, and funds to be used at the discretion of Governors through the Governor’s… more →
Latinx Community College Students Experiencing Financial Aid Income Verification: A Critical Race Analysis
Every year millions of students seeking access to federal financial aid complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) application which grants an estimated $234 billion in federal aid in the 2020-21 academic year. Upon receiving students’ FAFSA, the U.S. Department of Education… more →
Learning to Value Girls: Balanced Infant Sex Ratios at Higher Parental Education in the U.S. 1969-2018
Topics: Families and CommunitiesInfant sex ratios that differ from the biological norm provide a measure of gender status inequality that is not susceptible to social desirability bias. Ratios may become less biased with educational expansion through reduced preference for male children. Alternatively, bias could increase with… more →
Excellence for all? University honors programs and human capital formation
Tags: Human capital, EquityCan public university honors programs deliver the benefits of selective undergraduate education within otherwise nonselective institutions? We evaluate the impact of admission to the Honors College at Oregon State University, a large nonselective public university. Admission to the Honors… more →
The Effects and Local Implementation of School Finance Reforms on Teacher Salary, Hiring and Turnover
Min Sun, Christopher A. Candelaria, David S. Knight, Zachary LeClair, Sarah E. Kabourek, Katherine Chang.Knowing how policy-induced salary schedule changes affect teacher recruitment and retention will significantly advance our understanding of how resources matter for K-12 student learning. This study sheds light on this issue by estimating how legislative funding changes in Washington state in… more →
The narrowing gender wage gap among faculty at public universities in the U.S.
Tags: Higher education, EquityWe study the conditional gender wage gap among faculty at public research universities in the U.S. We begin by using a cross-sectional dataset from 2016 to replicate the long-standing finding in research that conditional on rich controls, female faculty earn less than their male colleagues. Next… more →
Why Do School Districts Matter? An Interdisciplinary Framework and Empirical Review
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: School districts, EquityWhat guidance does research provide school districts about how to improve system performance and increase equity? Despite over 30 years of inquiry on the topic of effective districts, existing frameworks are relatively narrow in terms of disciplinary focus (primarily educational leadership… more →
Unequal & Increasingly Unfair: How Federal Policy Creates Disparities in Special Education Funding
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernanceTags: Students with disabilities, EquityThe formula used to allocate federal funding for state and local special education programs is one of the Individual with Disabilities Act’s most critical components. The formula not only serves as the primary mechanism for dividing available federal dollars among states, it also represents… more →
Documenting Their Decisions: How Undocumented Students Enroll and Persist in College
Tags: Immigrant origin students, EquityThe absence of federal support leaves undocumented students reliant on state policies to financially support their postsecondary education. We descriptively examine the postsecondary trajectories of tens of thousands of undocumented students newly eligible for California’s state aid program,… more →
The Rise of (E)quality Politics: The Political Development of Higher Education Policy, 1969-1999
Topics: Policy, Politics, and GovernancePublic discussions of racial inclusion and equal opportunity initiatives in the U.S. are often met with claims that expanding access to an institution, space, or public good is likely to diminish its quality. Examples of this pattern include: anticipated (and real) property value declines when… more →
Returns to Different Postsecondary Investments: Institution Type, Academic Programs, and Credentials
Early research on the returns to higher education treated the postsecondary system as a monolith. In reality, postsecondary education in the United States and around the world is highly differentiated, with a variety of options that differ by credential (associates degree, bachelor’s… more →
Segregating Gotham's Youngest: Racial/Ethnic Sorting and the Choice Architecture of New York City’s Pre-K for All
Topics: School ChoiceNew York City’s Pre-K for All (PKA) is the Nation’s largest universal early childhood initiative, currently serving some 70,000 four-year-olds. Stemming from the program’s choice architecture as well as the City’s stark residential segregation, PKA programs are extremely segregated by… more →
How Did It Get This Way? Disentangling the Sources of Teacher Quality Gaps Through Agent-Based Modeling
We use publicly available, longitudinal data from Washington state to study the extent to which three interrelated processes—teacher attrition from the state teaching workforce, teacher mobility between teaching positions, and teacher hiring for open positions—contribute to “teacher quality gaps… more →
How to “QuantCrit:” Practices and Questions for Education Data Researchers and Users
Topics: Methods‘QuantCrit’ (Quantitative Critical Race Theory) is a rapidly developing approach that seeks to challenge and improve the use of statistical data in social research by applying the insights of Critical Race Theory. As originally formulated, QuantCrit rests on five principles; 1) the centrality of… more →